


Blackbird

by Schemilix



Series: Blood and Gold [5]
Category: Final Fantasy Tactics
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-08
Updated: 2013-08-08
Packaged: 2017-12-22 20:42:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/917810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schemilix/pseuds/Schemilix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is a dog; a crow; a black fish; an incubus; it sits or watches or crawls on its belly, but it is always there. It burns in his skin when he comes to Vormav’s bed. He lets it fill his veins with ink.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blackbird

When he is ten he is obsessed with death, and does not know why. He is the child with the eye for drawing corpses in repose, the one to see birds fallen from the nest and see the way their neck twists in death. 

He is not a malicious boy. Those he finds alive he returns. He feeds stray cats. Those that die he observes, he buries them and feels like a therian priest.

He scratches his skin and thinks how sad it is that he will never know what his own skeleton looks like.

\-----

When he is thirteen death has crept from them to him. It lingers in the folds of his clothes. Death is not decay; it has no smell. It is a miasma he cannot see that weighs as much as a corpse on his shoulders. He carries it with him. It sits on his books to make them heavier than he feels he can carry; on his chest when he sleeps; it scratches his arms and his chest until he realises it is his own nails that excoriates him.

He thinks he is mad. The other boys taunted him because he is strange and untalkative; now they avoid him, the hollow look in his eyes. His parents dismiss the blackness as the turbulent humours of youth. 

\----

When he is fourteen it has burrowed inside and made holes. He loses pieces, like buttons. They feel inconsequential but he knows he is becoming shabby and ill-worn. He knows others must see it. 

It feels no longer like a presence but like a skin and with it creeping in his hands he hurts himself in earnest. It does nothing. He goes to his tutor and against the desk he bares his body for him, and hisses and cries out because he is too rough with him; and that does nothing but numb him. 

\----

When he is sixteen numbness is something he seeks. It is what passes for happiness and makes him forget the warren the beast has made of him. He thinks it is in his bones; they ache. His father is often absent and speaks no longer of the humours of adolescence. He knows his father is eaten by the same breed of creature. He sees it snapping its jaws in his eyes.

He inherited those eyes - dark and tired. He looks in the mirror and sees that he recognised himself in those teeth.

\----

His eighteenth year is easier; he gives the creature to the Gods. When others sin he takes it. Like poison, he is more immune than they. The doses of their suffering are to them a burden but to him little more than a foul taste. 

He holds funerals and weddings with the same bland indifference. He baptises a pretty young girl and that night tries to kill himself. He fails because his body drops the tincture somewhere he doesn’t think he can reach. 

The black pit is heavy in his breast. It pins his legs and he shuts his eyes, and sleeps too much, and pretends he is dead.

He is twenty and they recruit him for his sword and he tries his hardest to impale himself on the enemy blade and prays for those he must kill. For his deathwish he is promoted; they see his pain and call it valour because they do not understand. They call his scars ‘war wounds’ when he sees it only as a welcome to a life he deserves. 

Sometimes his wounds make him sick. He has the same dim hope that they will kill him as his mother did when she planned their trips and hoped it did not rain.

\----

Barich becomes a friend of his - the shell of him that is not infected at least. He steals his gun and puts it in his mouth and remembers only as he starts to squeeze the trigger that he turns twenty-two today. The gun drops from his hand again. 

Coward, he thinks. He puts the gun back before Barich can ask questions.

\----

It is a dog; a crow; a black fish; an incubus; it sits or watches or crawls on its belly, but it is always there. It burns in his skin when he comes to Vormav’s bed and fucks him; he lets it fill his veins with ink.

He watches Eleth sicken, he watches her die. He watches her body fall apart in the way his mind failed to grow, feeling nothing. That part of him has been cauterised.

It gets confused, briefly, at Vormav’s grief. Something reaches out and tries to feel sympathy. He strokes his hair and tells the worst person in the world that he understands what it is to be eaten. 

For the briefest moment their eyes meet. Vormav’s pinprick pupils are black and familiar. The beast in them looks like a friend.

\----

And yet when his body is broken and he lies bleeding, he does not wish to die. Fear is beyond him. His mind races, untethered by working flesh. He thinks of those pinprick pupils and how his clothes still smell of him. He thinks how their fingers wind together and lets himself pretend. Strange that he would go on living, to let himself pretend. 

The sleep that has evaded him all these years creeps on him. It is the wings of his black bird; they take him home, where darkness is.

**Author's Note:**

> For those who don't know, Eleth is the name I give to Vormav's wife.


End file.
